Main menu

Tag Archives: fertility treatment

Contraception is the deliberate prevention of conception or impregnation. It makes sense. Contra meaning against, and the end of the word showing conception. I am sometimes surprised when students can’t work that out in class. But maybe that’s because students don’t use the word contraception very often, instead just referring to a method of contraception: condoms. Well today in the news they are debating the accuracy of fertility apps being used by women to avoid getting pregnant, so as a method of natural family planning and contraception. It is based on the rhythm method (calendar method).

To use the rhythm method, you track your menstrual history to predict when you’ll ovulate. This helps you determine when you’re most likely to conceive. If you’re hoping to get pregnant, you can use the rhythm method to determine the best days to have sex. Similarly, if you’re hoping to avoid pregnancy, you can use the rhythm method to determine which days to avoid unprotected sex.

Nobody’s playing God says the Independent’s Editorial today all about three parent babies. The so called “three-parent babies” is when the DNA of a third party can be used to prevent painful and fatal inherited diseases in babies.

The singer John Legend and his wife Chrissy Teigen have always been open about their fertility struggles and today John continued to be candid when saying that they’d resort to IVF again in an attempt at having three or four more babies.

“A lot of people struggle with fertility and they shouldn’t be ashamed of it. A lot of people want to have kids and maybe can’t do it the natural way… I think people should do it if that’s what will work for them.” The photo below show John Legend, Chrissy and their baby Luna.

Doctors are saying they want to start making ‘three person babies‘. How does it work?Three-person IVF replaces the defective power packs in the mother’s egg – called mitochondria – with healthy ones from a donor woman. A three-person baby has most of its genetic inheritance from its parents, but also a tiny amount from the donor woman.

Even though Parliament have already approved this development there are some scientists who are saying they want more checks to be done to decide if it is completely safe or not.

A new study has shown that all the add-ons that fertility clinics sell to patients, some costing up to £3,500, have no evidence to support that they’ll increase the chances of pregnancy. The treatments include genetic screening tests, additional drugs, blood tests to measure the immune system and special devices to house an embryo. They can cost from £100 up to £3,500 each on top of the costs of IVF. People often presume that if a doctor is telling you something it would be be backed up by some evidence. Unfortunately this report shows it is not necessarily the case

“Some of these treatments are of no benefit to you whatsoever and some of them are harmful.”

Only one treatment, called an endometrial scratch, was supported by moderate quality evidence it would help. It involves a procedure to scratch the womb lining to help an embryo successfully implant, although the evidence for this treatment was not itself beyond doubt.

Jessica Hepburn spent over £70,000 on eleven cycles of IVF and had many different “add-ons”. She never had a baby. “These are doctors. We believe what doctors tell us and this is a doctor that holds my happiness in his hands,” she said.

What is IVF?

In vitro fertilisation (IVF) is one of several techniques available to help couples with fertility problems have a baby.

During IVF, an egg is removed from the woman’s ovaries and fertilised with sperm in a laboratory.

The fertilised egg, called an embryo, is then returned to the woman’s womb to grow and develop.

It can be carried out using a woman’s eggs and a man’s sperm, or eggs and/or sperm from donors.

The number of babies born through surrogacy has risen, due to improvements in fertility technology and the reduced stigma about non-traditional families. Some 214 surrogate babies were registered with the courts in 2014-15, up from 138 in 2011-12.

Surrogate births are governed by the 1985 Surrogacy Arrangements Act, which bans commercial payments and requires a six-week period immediately after a baby is born before parties can apply to the courts for a formal transfer of parental rights. Campaigners and lawyers argue such rules are now outdated. The Government has said that reforms to the surrogacy law could be introduced by 2020.

But for now new mothers are getting upset at how they are being forced to hold their new children in such sterile conditions as the hospital car park. One new mother described how “[Hospital staff] took us off the premises. They got the surrogate’s husband to come and escort us out. He physically carried the baby out of the hospital and handed us the baby in the car park. It seems hospitals don’t want to take any responsibility in case a legal dispute occurs and it has happened on their territory so they’re liable.”

She explained: “We felt like we were stealing a baby. It put a huge strain on everything. There’s an overwhelming sense you’ve done something wrong by having a child through surrogacy. We’re good law-abiding people and we were treated like we’d done something wrong. I felt incredibly vulnerable.”

An interesting link to this story is the recent BBC Scotland documentary by Alex Jones entitled Fertility and Me which sets out the statistics on infertility as well as the emotional turmoil couples feel when they don’t get pregnant as quickly or easily as they hope.

It isn’t the first time it’s been done, but a new method has successfully resulted in a five-month-old boy having the usual DNA from his mum and dad, plus a tiny bit of genetic code from a donor. US doctors took the unprecedented step to ensure the baby boy would be free of a genetic condition that his Jordanian mother carries in her genes.

Experts say the move heralds a new era in medicine and could help other families with rare genetic conditions.